Some dingdong in Denver claims to have video proof that aliens visited a fellow Colorado resident (hat tip to Darcey at Dust My Broom). Wonderful. Footage so grainy and indistinct that a convenience store security camera would be ashamed of shooting it.

Here’s the thing, though.

If any such notional aliens existed and actually had visited Earth, my sense is they need more help from us than we need from them.

They have enough smarts to cross interstellar distances, but not enough to invent a camera with a telephoto lens—something humans managed to do back in 1891. No sir, these aliens have to conduct all of their reconnaissance with the Mark I eyeball. Maybe they were wondering why their OnStar system failed to kick in and they needed directions to the nearest mechanic.

They can evade SPACECOM’s tracking radars and penetrate the North American ADIZ easily enough, but they haven’t got the smarts to build a few UAVs that can loiter overhead and collect data. Humans, however, had been sending automated probes to other planets for a few decades before any astronaut ever set foot on another celestial body.

There may well be aliens out there in the galaxy, but I’ve yet to see a UFO claim that conclusively demonstrates remote sensing technology on par with—let alone superior to—our own.

Like I mentioned above, the thing that sets off my skeptic alarm for any number of alien visitations is that there is no internal consistency or logic to their methods. They operate stealthy craft but have zero concern for humans seeing them out in the open? They can’t, apparently, operate ROVs or UAVs sophisticated enough to keep tabs on us without the guy on the ground being aware that he’s under surveillance? Cripes. We can do that stuff today. And in all of these supposed visits, no alien craft or being has ever left behind equipment, packaging, or any kind of non-terrestrial artifact?

As a thought experiment, imagine how we would react if we discovered a sentient, intelligent but less-technologically-developed species living on a celestial body in this solar system.

Would we immediately race over there with a planetary lander and play peek-a-boo into their homes? Or would we be inclined to park a few surveillance birds in orbit and see what the hell was going on, first? Maybe develop some sort of exo-atmospheric ROV that we could use to fly at high altitude and get higher-resolution images and data, without unnecessarily endangering human (or alien) lives. Spend a few decades observing their world, its environment, its civilisations and their organisation, and what sort of technology they did have. Perhaps try to figure out how to communicate with them, so that when we did get to the planetary lander stage, we wouldn’t be climbing out of the lander, unfurling the flag, and watching astronauts die needlessly. Planetary exploration is not an inexpensive venture; and it really is all about conservation of scarce resources and opportunities in order to maximize the quality of data that you get back.

Now ask yourself why none of these alien visitations demonstrate anything close to that level of forethought and intelligence.